As you see, the smaller the amount of arable land per capita, the smaller the house - except for Australia, which is still a young country in terms of immigration and development, and also has limited water resources.

Taking it one step further, I divided the house size by the arable land per person:

We now have two outliers, Australia and the UK. The real story here, I think: Britain is far too crowded and dependent on imported food.

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5 comments:

Points:a)Name a Northern European country that isn't dependent on imported food.b)Given that the UK was first to industrialise, has been importing food since the early 1800's & apart from the two world wars, this has not been an issue - so why worry?c)London & Singapore are equally dependant on imported food.d) Average House size is smaller in scotland than england - it has far more to do with planning restrictions & general prodnosery than anything logical.

a) can of worms, wish somebody else would join me in working out these future challenges. But:

"Hailing the strong export growth of the past six years, the European Commission reports that the “resulting improvement in the EU’s trade balance turned it into a net exporter in 2010, for the first time since 2006, with a €6 billion agricultural trade surplus”." - EC report, May 2011, quoted in

http://www.tni.org/files/download/CAPpaper-draft_0.pdf

... whereas for the UK "In 2012, 24 countries together accounted for 90% of UK food supply. Just over half of this (53%) was supplied domestically from within the UK." -

Granted, these stats tend to quote in money terms, which is not helpful as we don't eat banknotes.

b) We are in the later stages of de-industrialising, with a swollen populace and fossil-energy-dependent way of life, just as energy prices are about to start their long and seemingly endless climb; and wars and global population increase may yet disrupt our global food chain.

c) "Singapore is a highly developed trade-oriented market economy. Singapore's economy has been ranked as the most open in the world, least corrupt,most pro-business, with low tax rates (14.2% of Gross Domestic Product, GDP) and has the third highest per-capita GDP in the world; in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Singapore

If only we were so similar.

d) Scotland's population is estimated at 5.295 million, and arable land (declining, btw) 602,400 ha in 2008, which gives a ratio of land to population of around 0.11 ha, similar to the UK as a whole. But Scotland is more mountainous, and colder, so I would suggest there's less suitable land for buildng houses, and larger houses cost more to heat.